The decision last week by a National Labor Relations Board official in Chicago to upend collegiate athletics by characterizing Northwestern University's scholarship football players as "employees" is a terrible idea that will do nothing to improve college sports and may well destroy them.

Yes, those are strong words. And let me be clear — I am not defending the status quo. The Pac-12 Conference, of which I have been commissioner since 2009, along with other conferences around the country, have been pressing for NCAA reform that would reflect the evolving needs of student-athletes, allowing for increased academic support, improved student-athlete health care, and enhanced athletic scholarships up to the full cost of attendance. I am confident reform is coming within the NCAA in the next few months, and soon universities will be allowed to provide this additional support for student-athletes.

But there is absolutely no question that turning students into employees would take us in precisely the opposite direction that we need to go. The challenge collegiate sports faces in an era of expanding popularity is to ensure that revenues are used for the benefit of the universities and their students, and to ensure that the paramount role of "student" in "student-athlete" is not obscured. We need to safeguard and strengthen our commitment to academics to help find the right balance, not throw in the towel and characterize students as employees.

We believe that the NLRB official's finding that student-athletes on scholarship are not primarily students is profoundly wrong. At Pac-12 universities, which are some of the most prestigious academic institutions in the world, student-athletes represent the intersection of academic excellence and athletic achievement, graduating with their fellow students and winning the most NCAA titles of any conference. Recent Pac-12 football student-athletes Andrew Luck of Stanford and Matt Barkley of the University of Southern California exemplify this balance, opting to delay turning professional to achieve their degrees and reap the full value of their educations.

And beyond a small handful that turns pro, the vast majority of our 7,000 Pac-12 student-athletes are on our campuses to get the education and experiences that will prepare them for those careers. The notion that they see themselves as employees rather than students is laughable.

Right now, for technical legal reasons, the ruling only applies to the sport of football and private universities, but the misguided thinking that produced it might be applied to other sports and public universities as well. And because the "revenue" sports at most universities support the "non-revenue" sports – including sports such as baseball, soccer, softball, volleyball, swimming, and tennis (which I played while a student at Harvard) — the entire world of intercollegiate athletics as we know it could shrink dramatically because of a lack of resources. Women's sports could be hit particularly hard, which would be a real travesty given all that we have achieved over the last 40 years since the advent of Title IX, especially because it is unknown how "employee" status would intersect with Title IX.

With this demise would come the loss of opportunity for thousands of students who, without athletic scholarships, might never be able to attend college. At the Pac-12 alone, two-thirds of our students-athletes receive athletics aid across as many as 36 varsity sports. The loss of any athletic program would be a blow to the valuable access and opportunity athletics afford to many students on our campuses.

I understand that some people are frustrated by what they perceive to be a slow pace to NCAA reform. But classifying students as employees of their universities is the wrong prescription for addressing the evolving needs of student-athletes and improving intercollegiate athletics.